


They Say It All Starts with A—

by Vrunka



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Gen, Gore
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-09
Updated: 2019-04-09
Packaged: 2020-01-07 14:46:58
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,940
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18412805
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Vrunka/pseuds/Vrunka
Summary: Bang.Coping is an odd way to put it, but she guesses that is sort of what this is.





	They Say It All Starts with A—

**Author's Note:**

> Drama drama drama lmfao

They Say It All Starts with A

 

Bang—

The gun pointed at her head goes lax, the tip—barrel? Muzzle? she’s never known for sure—dipping down away from her head. And then it slips from the man’s fingers and clatters to the dusty earth.

Angela’s own hand is trembling around the standard issue handgun Ana had insisted that she carry. Her fingers are still locked around the trigger, muscles clamped so hard it’s a wonder the gun only fired once. She hadn’t checked the clip before she left, hadn’t ever figured she would use the sidearm issued to her.

There’s a neat little bullet hole in the middle of the enemy’s forehead. His bad luck; she had been aiming for his shoulder. Angela stares down into it and cannot help but visualize the damage: the bullet ripping through tissue and brain matter, bisecting through the cosmos of his head like a comet through the night sky. Destroying. She drops the handgun. She covers her face with her hands.

People need her. They need her now. The battle around them has not stopped for this drama, this little tragedy played out in acts. The enemy (a man, who probably had a family and a wife and a child and whole web of people now bisected by her bullet, ripped asunder) is dead and she is not and that is what Jack would say is the end of it. She must continue on.

She drags in a breath through her nose, another that whistles sharply past her teeth. She picks up her handgun and re-holsters it; she gathers the supplies she had dropped when the man jumped her. Her med-kit, her syringes. Determined, she moves back into the thick of the fray.

She’ll forget about the man, this one dead man who made the mistake of surprising her. She’ll forget this ever happened.

She promises herself.

But then, she’s always sort of been shit at keeping promises.

On the flight back to base she sees the scenario again. Different this time, maybe the man gut shot and Mercy (not Angela but someone strong and capable) stepping in, saving him, blood up to her elbows but he makes it and he changes and he sees the error of his ways and he swears off the war and the fighting and goes to his family and they start a life of farming in the country. Her bullet catches him in the chest and sobbing, sobbing he dies in her arms as she apologizes, nicked artery there isn’t anything she can do and they’re both crying but he forgives her and the world keeps turning. Anything but what she got, nothing to atone to, a dead man with a hole in his head.

Angela does not pass off the small flask of post-battle spirits that always makes rounds in the helicopter after these dog fights. She usually does, declines it with a small smile and a shake of her head. This time she doesn’t, she takes it, she drinks deep, deep.

The liquor is cheap, something akin to Icelandic candy in taste, cloying in her nose. She coughs, sputters, then drinks again. It goes down smoother the second time, though not by much.

She passes the bottle away.

She thinks of the man, her bullet missing him completely and his tearing into her instead. She thinks of the end and how close she came to it.

“May I have another drink,” she asks and wordlessly the flask is passed back to her. She drinks from it. The third time at least, it tastes like being alive.

If she had shot him in the throat it could have been like a movie. She saw that once in a film, arterial spray in an artful wave across a wall. She remembers watching and thinking it could have been so easy to avoid all the bloodshed. She remembers thinking someone should put pressure on that wound. She remembers thinking someone should try.

Jack Morrison, for all his airs and fancy titles, considers this trying, she guesses.

“You should have told your commanding officer,” he says. He says it gently, condescending, she’s not even sure he knows how exactly like an asshole he sounds. “Those kinds of things—well we just. We like to know, Angela.”

She licks her lips and she can still taste the lingering ghosts of alcohol hidden on her skin. There’s a bottle of whiskey in her desk that she bought when they landed. It’s half empty. It’s a rougher drink than the shit on the helicopter but it gets her buzzed enough not to think about the man and the Way It Could Have Gone.

“Okay,” she says, “so you’re my commanding officer and I’m telling you. I shot an enemy insurgent. He had me cornered I had no choice. Okay? So now you know. May I go, Jack?”

“Angela,” he says. “I know this must be difficult for an angel like you.”

Angel. Fucking angel. Fucking prick. He only calls her that when he thinks she’s being unreasonable, usually when they’re arguing about things like mass production of her nanotech. This is her first time hearing it from the other side of the barrel, from an act of violence instead of pacifism.

There’s just no winning with him.

Goddamn asshole.

“Are you listening?” he asks, cutting himself off mid-sentence.

“Sure.”

His shoulders slump, his head tips. “I’m just trying to say that you might need to talk to someone. I know that it’s...it seems easy to cope with this kinda thing but it isn’t. And sometimes a professional ear can help.”

“Professional ear?” The coldness in her voice is harsh enough to kill.

Jack bites his lip. “I just mean someone like a counselor, Ange. Someone who can help with coping. I’m not threatening you with a psych eval, and I’m hoping you won’t make me.”

She repeats the words to him. “Psych evaluation? Me?” She takes a breath and it comes terribly, terribly shallow. Clenching in her chest.

If she had shot him in the chest it could have taken anywhere between five and twenty minutes to die. Gut-shot, gored, he could have bled out in her hands. Would that have been better? Would that have been worse?

Fucking Christ, she needs another drink.

“Jack Morrison,” she hisses, the ‘s’ catching sibilant and hard on her teeth. “I may not have chosen death as my living, but this is not the first person who has died under my hands. I would thank you to have enough respect for me and for my work to fucking remember that.”

He takes a step back. Like her words have wounded him, capable as any bullet, tearing and rending and ending. Then he hardens, his shoulders straighten, his hands clench. “Talk to the counselor, Angela,” he says. “I’m not asking.”

So she goes. He doesn’t leave her with another choice.

She imagines the man bleeding out as she sits on the couch of one Doctor G. Rankin. The G stands for Gina. Angela read about her once in a magazine article. They say she is very, very good. What she is is young, barely older than Angela herself.

They make small talk about school. They make small talk about being prodigies, the weight of it. Angela smiles in all the right places, chuckles on cue.

She lies through her goddamn teeth, snowballs with the best of them when Doctor Rankin, sits back, sits up and says, “So tell me what’s going on.”

She lies like it’s the easiest thing in the world. Like the ghost of the man isn’t haunting her whiskey hangovers. She lies like he doesn’t even exist anymore. She lies like he is dead, instead of dying in her arms or at her feet over and over and over again. And when she is finished lying, Doctor Rankin nods, and pats her knee and lets her go.

Scott-free.

Without even so much as suspension of duties.

Angela drinks at her desk and imagines that man sits opposite her and drinks as well. Sometimes it pours out of the hole in his throat, clots of blood and amber whiskey drenching his sleek black underarmor. Rarely he sits and stares and the black bullet hole between his eyes yawns and yawns and draws her in.

Angela drinks.

For two weeks straight, Angela drinks. She gets looks from her coworkers, whispers behind hands from the staff in the medical wing. Moira’s cold smile, Jack Morrison’s disappointed head-shaking in the hall. All of it she can deal with.

The dead man she cannot.

She’s drinking on a Tuesday, hunched behind her desk and tipping the flask back into her mouth when Ana strolls in. She’s dressed in a sleek black jacket, her hair pulled back into a no nonsense bun. She looks dressed for business, actual business, probably a meeting with some head of some department somewhere. She doesn’t ask to sit in the chair opposite Angela’s. She just does it.

In fact, she sits right on top of the dead man. Angela doesn’t laugh, doesn’t cackle at how quickly he is dispelled, but it’s a close thing. The whiskey has her tongue feeling loose, too big for her mouth.

For a moment the two women just stare at one another. Angela has always looked up to Ana Amari, idolized her in a way that she hasn’t with the other members of Overwatch. Ana is like a mother to her at times, a ridiculous and overbearing Aunt at others. Someone who Angela does not want to see her like this.

She swallows. Her fingers shake. She can see them on the desk, jittering; numb from the liquor, separated from the whole.

“My dear,” Ana says, “what in the world are you thinking?” It’s softer than it could be said, gentle.

Angela stares down at her fingers. She thinks about a million things and in all of them the dead man, the dead man, the dead man. As it has been for weeks. She looks at Ana, at the woman she respects almost more than anyone. A woman who is real, who is present, and who wants to know what she is thinking.

What is she thinking?

“I’m tired of this shit,” Angela says. Like a confession. Whispered between her teeth. “I’m really fucking tired of it.” Of lying, of drinking, of being unable to claw herself out from under the weight of the phantom in her arms with the bullet in his head.

She is tired. Bone-tired.

For a moment Ana just stares. She doesn’t look taken aback by Angela’s language as Jack had, she doesn’t look disappointed in the tone. Ana stares and studies and says nothing. Her fingers cross. Her heels click on the tiled floor as her weight shifts from foot to foot. A piece of hair escaped from her bun, sways with her head as she moves it, catches the light, distracting.

“So tell me about it,” she says finally. “Beginning to end, Angie.”

“There isn’t really an end.”

Ana smiles. “Then from the beginning to wherever you are now. It’s how you start an end, my dear, by facing it.”

Angela swallows again, her throat feels thick, feels coated. She clears it, coughs against the back of her hand. “I guess,” she says. “I mean, well, they say it all starts with a bang right? A bang and the universe existed. A bang and I—,” her fingers move, pointer reflexively curling inward. “Bang,” she says, and she does it again, finger guns a young Fareeha would be proud of.

Bang.

**Author's Note:**

> I spent way longer on this than I should have for a bunch of ungrateful people who uphold unwritten standards without prior warning and tell me that my volunteered time is essentially worthless. Oh well.


End file.
